


You, Echoing Streetside

by museicalitea



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Established Relationship, Introspection, M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-20
Updated: 2016-05-20
Packaged: 2018-06-08 07:54:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,549
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6846016
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/museicalitea/pseuds/museicalitea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              
<p></p><blockquote>
  <p>His legs feel wobbly, and he vaguely registers that it's probably as much <em>this</em> as it is the abruptness of his cooling muscles—</p>
  <p>This: fears assuaged, blown away like sakura blossoms in a spring breeze; wobbling on the brink of never letting Kazuhito go again; something so unreal and relieving that he can't give it a name.</p>
</blockquote>
            </blockquote>





	You, Echoing Streetside

**Author's Note:**

  * For [anfuu](https://archiveofourown.org/users/anfuu/gifts).



> This is for the lovely Anfu, who prompted me many months ago on Tumblr with "the way you said 'I love you' + not said to me". This... _technically_ fills the prompt. Mostly it's a bit of introspective experimentation with some post-canon established relationship headcanon thrown in, and I'm very glad to have finally finished it.
> 
> (Title is from Vienna Teng's "Recessional")

The thing about mornings is that they are quiet. Not silent.

Up above a busy road in Sendai, Hisashi always wakes to the rumble and windspeed of commuter traffic. It pulls him from sleep and shivers through his bones—the light whipdrag of cars, the crackle and growl of the big trucks, the soul-tearing roar of a motorbike: the sort that would cut through even Kazuhito’s sound slumber and have him bury himself under the duvet in disgust. But the noise enlivens Hisashi; the closer it comes to brushing past his heart and throat and very soul, the more he welcomes it.

And mornings mean too the sound of every opening door and every run of the tap amplified ten times over by the five a.m. darkness, rippled shadowy orange by streetlamps and headlights pulsing in through the curtains. Quiet mornings are the ones where Hisashi can hear his footfalls on the pavement as he runs, but where they don’t echo back at him from empty bank buildings and stern glassfronts. On a quiet morning, he drinks coffee to the sound of a waking city and the soft affirmation of plans to go to the supermarket after work; and oftentimes as he’s walking to work, Kazuhito sends him texts from his train. Every buzz against his hand is like a heartbeat—a murmur that brings a bass beat into his mornings.

A rhythm; a constant.

But this morning, when Hisashi wakes at five a.m. as ever, it is in a room with a single bed, darker than pitch with the house set so far back from the street, and the silence is heavy on his ears. Not even the birds are singing in the outskirts of Torono town.

He barely lets himself blink away the grogginess clouding his eyes and dragging at his brain before he heaves himself up on one elbow and gropes across his mattress for his phone. It takes an age in the dark, and only when he thinks to lean over the side of the bed does he find it, lying innocently a foot away on the floor.

He turns it on, and sags back into the pillow as his stomach turns hollow in disappointment.

This is turning into the fourth day in a row that Kazuhito hasn’t messaged him, has seen his texts and pictures and everything and not responded, and Hisashi honestly can’t figure out what he’s done wrong. His mother has told him about six times to  _ “Just ring Kazuhito-kun on your phone for goodness’ sake!” _ but he’s ruled that out because international calling charges are ridiculous, and every single time he’s checked Skype in the last week, Kazuhito hasn’t been around.

It’s not nearly the same messaging in the mornings instead of talking, and the way he can talk and get excited around his other friends isn’t the same as how he can be around Kazuhito. There is less need for brightness and full volume. Many times between them, a soft glow, audibility: these are enough. Quiet is not his default, but Hisashi can handle quiet just fine.

He hovers over the waiting message box, and very nearly starts to type. But he hesitates, and backs himself away before he can do something as futile as call again into a silence with no hope of response.

The thing is, Hisashi can't do silence. He can't do silence at all.

He’s become so used to the constancy of their communication that having it cut off as much as it has been since Kazu went overseas leaves him feeling like something’s been dug out of him. Kind of an emptiness deep in his chest. Sometimes, an invisible hand pinching and twisting at his gut.

The thing is, it’s more than just that there’s half a world between them. The reality of oceans around one side and the vastest landmass on Earth on the other never struck him, never got to him in his shelter of city streets and the peeling walls of a cramped apartment—

Or, it never did until that time he forgot for a moment and called out a greeting into the ninth month of perpetual silence. Until he woke up for the eighth time with a crick in his neck and a book bent in his lap, and realises  _ I was waiting up for him again _ —

Until he reached a point where somehow, two weeks had gone by between their last Skype chat and he couldn’t quite remember  _ exactly _ what Kazuhito’s voice sounded like, and one evening it had shot through him like ice water: there was that possibility that something could happen and he wouldn’t know. Something that would cut Kazuhito off from him forever.

It was silly, and he dismissed the thought as fast as he could, but right up until he went to bed he heard a flickering tongue in the low, cold corners of his mind— _ he could get in a car accident or fall down stairs and hit his head and you’d never know it'd be worse than that time in December when it was you you'd never know you’d never hear Kazu’s voice again _ —

He hadn’t gotten much sleep that night.

The next morning, he had forgotten about it, and that evening they talked—and it has never crossed his mind so sharply again. And yet, for all that, this paranoia, since its awakening, has never faded fully.

Hisashi’s always been an early riser, and now he switches on his lamp and slips out of bed. Wincing at the cold, he pulls his sweatshirt off his desk and tugs it on before heading downstairs. When he turns on the kitchen light, the darkness outside presses in blacker and colder against the meager warmth of a soft-glowing house, and he huddles further into his sweatshirt as he pokes through the pantry for pre-run breakfast food.

Leaning into the cupboard further, a shadow presses into him, unbidden:

Strong arms curling soft around his stomach—

A nose and a heavy heartbeat nuzzled into the crook of his neck—

_ Free massage is excellent, now if you wouldn't mind taking it a bit lower ‘cause I'm getting knots there— _

_ Cut it out or else I will princess carry you back to bed and morning butt-freezing will not happen— _

Hisashi presses his forehead against the door jamb. No one's carried him for nearly a year. He hasn't had this routine disturbed. And he could change it up himself, but part of the fun is the protests and the cuddling and Kazuhito, strong and stubborn.  _ There. _

There are a lot of things that haven't happened in nearly a year. He misses nearly all of them.

The distance clings to Hisashi. Growing up never shook his imagination, and these days in his head he traces the kilometres stretching over land and sea, imagines the breadth between them as the crow flies and nothing more. Sometimes it’s the only way he can get himself to sleep at night, thinking that  _ it’s a long way to Kazu, but it could be longer. _

So even though it’s only been four days and not fourteen, he misses Kazuhito. His laugh. The soft, measured lilt of his voice as he talks and it sweeps over Hisashi like liquid velvet. And this soft burst of longing makes him think of every long-term ache in this distance between them: all the things seeing Kazuhito on the other side of a laptop camera can’t give him. Things like his long-suffering dedication to making sure Hisashi stops falling asleep reading every night—secret smiles into his coffee when Hisashi makes it just right—the crystalline tones of his piano lighting up their flat—

His hugs, the safest and warmest place in the world.

Hisashi can manage on his own; that’s never been a problem. But it’s so much more comfortable and so, so much easier with Kazuhito there to fill the silence.

A soft whine precedes his family’s dog as Haruki pads into the kitchen, and Hisashi smiles even as he bites back a yawn. Yawns are catching, it seems, because Haruki bares open his mouth for Hisashi before Hisashi crouches down to scritch his head.

“Oi, what're you doing up?” he murmurs.

_ It’s so early. Shouldn’t you be tired? Aren’t there a thousand other things you would rather be doing than being awake at this hour— _

_ That’s what he would say. _

And as he gives Haruki’s ears one last fondle before the dog decides it really is too early and wanders off:  _ I hope you sleep well, daft dog. _

Lately, it’s been affecting his sleeping patterns. Hisashi doesn’t normally feel fatigue, but he’s felt it creep up on him more and more in the last month; a month where Kazu has been weirdly distant. He’s been staying up late, fiddling about on his phone and checking notifications every ten, or five, or two minutes, not letting himself unwind, not trying to relax because he would relax if Kazuhito just messaged him back, damn it—

And then at two in the morning when he accepts that it’s a lost cause, his brain buzzes and he starts thinking too hard, and an hour of tossing and turning isn’t enough to tire him out.

Last night, though, he slept well. He gave into his parents’ not-so-subtle hints to visit them after weeks of prodding, and they conspired to get two of his older siblings there at the same time. In their house, surrounded by life and light, he forgot all about his phone, and his wayward boyfriend. He’d fallen asleep before eleven to the rumble and whine of a plane flying high above his house. He rarely notices planes above the noise in Sendai, and the sound made him smile as he dozed off.

Now, though, there is nothing to stop his mind from wandering and wondering: 

_ Where are you, Kazuhito? Why won’t you talk to me? _

Within the hour, the night's inky sky leaches from the horizon, and bleeding golds and pinks mark the sunrise. And full of malaise and restless energy, Hisashi dresses, pockets his inhaler and keys, and is careful to shut the front door quieter than his usual wont as he heads out on a run.

The streets of a small town are disturbingly quiet when compared to even the suburbs of a big city. He passes by several people—middle-aged women out on their walks, a couple of high-schoolers with soccer legs and broad chests, someone who looks suspiciously like the ex-Seijou libero from his year—but there are no cars. Nothing to disturb the rising birdsong, nor the brief chatter of cicadas, nor his breath out of time with a bass beat of footfalls. He glances up to a clear, pale sky. It's going to be a nice day.

Faster than he thinks they will, his thoughts dissipate, one with every step, until his consciousness becomes the warmth and pull of his legs, short breaths plunging deep in his head. He swallows the streets up with his every stride,  _ breathe in breathe out breathe in breathe out, _ and the pavement and windrush he creates yield to him, push him on, respond to him like old friends—

They are constants he cannot doubt, and long as he can breathe and move, he will respond to their pull.

(This is the one thing Kazuhito being absent cannot change, and until he responds, Hisashi will run and keep his doubts and fears at bay.)

His route takes him in a wide, well-practised loop away from his parents’ house, and he comes back into his neighbourhood as the day opens up into a white-blue sky. Past house after house he runs, past lines of trees bringing themselves into summer green, and his steps take him around the corner three streets from home without seeing a soul for nearly half his run.

Way, way down at the end of the street, Hisashi sees a person in a dark jacket talking on their phone. As he pounds down the pavement, the guy draws to a halt, and his voice sifts down to him. Hoarse. Kind of exasperated. Not exactly trying to be quiet.

“...gonna have him fussing over me all day, don’t you—! Ugh… alright, I’m going, I’m going. Mm-hm. Love you too.”

As he passes by, Hisashi can’t help but smile. He’s got no idea if he’s ever seen this guy before, but something about the rise of his voice, getting into a flap about someone  _ fussing _ over him, of all things… it reminds him so, so much of—

“Hisashi!”

He stops dead. His body hasn't registered the stop and he breathes like he’s running still, short. Wheezy. Tight. His knees judder with the impact, and his stomach flips and he can't quite get his brain to work.

Footsteps. Just behind him, sneakers in even measure on the pavement. In the same breath, Hisashi turns. He doesn't dare to believe it.

And then he has to.

Because Narita Kazuhito, who is surely supposed to still be halfway across the world, faces him with phone in hand from halfway down the footpath. Just as tall as ever, fiercely tanned, in a jacket he doesn’t recognise. And as Hisashi stares, unable to form words or thoughts or movement to express anything of how he feels, Kazuhito smiles, an easy, delighted smile, and takes one, two, three steps towards him.

His words are lost. With a wave of adrenaline and longing and stunned, stuttering love crashing through his chest, there is nothing Hisashi can think to do except reciprocate; and it only takes four strides before his hands reach Kazuhito, or maybe Kazu reaches him first, and he grips the back of his jacket as he squeezes Kazu into the fiercest, tightest hug he can manage.

“You’re back,” he says, soft and choked from his throat. He doesn't have breath for more.

“Yeah.” Kazuhito’s words come out as little more than the idea of a breath. Something tight catches in Hisashi’s throat as they stand there, a tight mass of clinging limbs and heaving breaths and shaking chests. Then, suddenly rooted and firm: “Oh god, I’ve missed you so much.”

One of his hands slips up to rest in Hisashi’s hair, and it’s instinct by now for Hisashi to lean in as Kazu kisses the top of his head. He lingers there far longer than usual, one hand stroking through Hisashi’s hair and the other moving large and gentle on his back as Hisashi gets his breath back. His legs feel wobbly, and he vaguely registers that it's probably as much this as it is the abruptness of his cooling muscles—

This: fears assuaged, blown away like sakura blossoms in a spring breeze; wobbling on the brink of never letting Kazuhito go again; something so unreal and relieving that he can't give it a name.

There’s so much to say, too much time in front of them that Hisashi knows they will need to re-establish where they are and how they will be together. But right now, this is enough. Finally, after a year, he has this:

Kazuhito solid beneath him; the scent that is intrinsically his. The faint throb of his heartbeat. Their breaths, alternating, echoing through the air, filling the silence.

**Author's Note:**

> [Tumblr](http://museicaliteacup.tumblr.com/) | [Twitter](https://twitter.com/museicalitea)
> 
> (also watch this space there may be a second part)


End file.
